A user has access to a variety of different types of services, both locally and remotely over a network. For example, the user may shop at an ecommerce web site, write in a “blog”, read and respond to messages in a message board, communicate using instant messages, send and receive email, and so on. In addition, the user may interact with a variety of different groups using each of these services. For example, the user may interact with a variety of social groups via instance messages, including work colleagues, college friends, high school friends, family friends, family members, and so forth.
To interact with the variety of services, the user may be required or find it desirable to “log on” to the service by providing sign-in credentials, such as a user name and password. Once the user is logged into traditional systems, however, the user is typically limited to a single representation of the user, such as a user tile, alias, and so forth. Thus, each other user, when logged into this traditional system, is presented with the same representation of the user. As previously described, however, the user may interact with a variety of different social groups, such as work colleagues and family members. Using such a traditional system, for instance, the work colleagues are presented with the same representation of the user as family members. Thus, a user may configure the representation to have limited “richness” such that the representation is generic to both social groups, thereby limiting the usefulness of the representation.